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Thanks for taking the time to do that quick test brynsank. The settings you had were the same in my case.
You're right, certainly not the same level of noise as my clips.
But, after watching your footage on an external monitor I can clearly see many compression artifacts around the top area of the telephone pole
It is most prevalent in the AVCI-50 720 24pn footage, less so in the ACI-50 -1080 footage, but still there.
I can also see it in the AVCI-100 720 24pn clip. Obviously the AVCI-100 1080 clip is the cleanest.

It seems to me that the downsampling to 720 by the camera is magnifying this issue.
Like you said not scientific, but certainly visible even by casual viewing.

Do you think this is a problem and shouldn't be happening, or is this just the nature of the HPX250?
I question this because my HMC40 never made me question the quality of AVCHD.
In some cases the footage from the HMC40 (not low light) is cleaner than the HPX250

Yes, definitely still some visible artifacting and more prevalent in the AVC-I 50 for sure. I'm really curious to know what could have been causing the compression artifacts in your case, the example you uploaded was really quite awful.

FCP doesn't recognize the MXF files. You need to transcode to a quicktime file.

Male_man - no offense, but the test was done for mmaller, not you. So if you want it some other way you're going to have to ask a little nicer than that. There are many ways to read the MXF files without needing it to be transcoded for you.

Oh, my bad! (Something got lost n the translation) I wasn't trying to issue a directive. I thought you made a mistake, but it's obvious I did. I totally forgot about compressor and the reader from panasonic(Thanks to mmaller)

Guys, lets try and keep this on topic and not get into any flames here.
Everyone on this forum is incredibly helpful and it's great to have this exchange available.

Thank you agin brynsank for taking the trouble to post your test,
and you're welcome male_man for the info.

I don't know why my sample was so bad, maybe someone else can offer an explanation as to why.
My main concern at this point is if there is a specific problem with my (HPX250) camera that is causing this or if it's operator error to some extent.

I will continue to test when I get the chance and post any more findings to this thread